Derelict
by Kindcaidlyn
Summary: Mal. Bad. In the Latin.


**A/N**: _Warning: this chapter contains non-explicit references to violence and rape_.

Lucretia had always been a drifter.

For generations, her family had been pioneers of the new worlds— time out of mind, they had wandered the stars, generations of terraforming laborers, farmers, construction workers. Her grandparents had come to this barren rock of a moon, to grind out a living in the unforgiving soil. The old derelict they had traveled in still stood silhouetted every evening on the hill beyond. Most of it had been scrapped for parts, and only children and the occasional wildlife ventured up there now. Even so, it was a symbol of sorts, a reminder of the hardships that had driven them there—and that there was no going back.

Lucretia spent half her childhood in the shadow of the derelict with her older sister and younger brother, playing at war games and home-making and hide-and-seek. The cargo hold was the best for hiding, because there were a thousand ways to sneak out when someone came looking, and the cockpit still had most of the buttons and dials that could fascinate any child for hours.

Having survived nearly sixteen winters, she was now far too old to go to the derelict to play. Hardly more than a thousand people inhabited the entire surface of their little moon, and survival was of first priority. Sometimes, though, in the evening, she would stop and watch the sun set behind the old ark ship and the fauna creep into the hold where they made their homes. A slender young tree struggled to grow up through a broken window. It was at these moments that the part of her that was the wanderer understood that silent ache that belonged to her ancestors—the longing to do something more than merely survive.

Most days, however, just surviving was enough.

Today she trailed behind Perdita and 'Colm on the way to town. The market was a burst of color and sound, and she drifted through it silently, observing only. 'Colm was twirling the six-incher he'd won down at the docks a week ago, and had thus far managed to keep hidden from their mother, and Perdita still worried and tried to heard them through the crowds as if they were still children.

The Reavers came out of nowhere.

She'd known nothing until the choking sound behind her made her turn. She thought Perdita was staring at her, only as she wasn't—she was staring at nothing with wide, glassy eyes, and Lucretia only just noticed the blood blossoming on Perdita's white shirt when her sister crumpled with a sort of slow-motion grace. By then, the monster was on her, tearing at her face and drowning out her screams with his inhuman roar, dragging her down into darkness.

* * *

><p>That she woke up at all was the first shock.<p>

She shouldn't be awake. She should be dead.

She felt dead. Her mind calculated the damage and said she should at least be in extreme pain.

So maybe she was really dead, and that was why it didn't hurt.

There was a horrible weight on her, and it took her traumatized mind a moment to process it wasn't imaginary. It was a body, huge and heavy and violating and utterly still.

_It's dead._ She knew she should feel something about that, something like glee or at least relief, but the numbness still held her in thrall.

There was something glinting. Her eyes refused to focus and her gaze slid away even as her brain function spiked in recognition.

It was a six inch knife.

Sensation poured back into her and she was again lost to the darkness.

* * *

><p>The outlanders eventually came looking. Not really for survivors, just for salvage. But the shout came, and a ravaged body was pulled from the wreckage still breathing. Barely. She woke again, screaming.<p>

The hospital was crude but clean; the doctor was ill-supplied but proficient. The diagnosis was a first for a Reaver victim: she would live. She had eight broken ribs, multiple fractures in her skull and limbs and even pelvic bone, a shattered ankle, head trauma, and countless bruises, scratches, and even bite marks, but she would live. The doctor was sure all of her fingers could be saved, but she would never regain full use the foot, and the scarring would be massive and permanent. The concussion and trauma had deprived her of several months of memories.

Most troublesome was the interior damage, difficult to ascertain with the limited medical equipment available. She had been bleeding, but it had stopped, so the doctor was hopeful. It was only upon further examination that the doctor suddenly came upon a moral dilemma. It shouldn't have been possible. No one knew for sure if Reavers had ever been human.

With a population of barely over a thousand, every soul was counted as necessary, even for the victims of rape and their offspring. Aborting an unborn child was unthinkable.

But there might be an exception for the child of a Reaver.

* * *

><p>No one asked her if she wanted to be the mother of a monster. She was a sixteen year old girl, uneducated, damaged, unmarried and pregnant, on a backwater moon that had another hundred years to go before they could even begin to think of being self-supporting. Broken physically and mentally, she might has well have been a pet or an interesting trinket, and a particularly fragile one at that. No, they just shipped her off to Shadow to be somebody else's problem. Her mother cried. Her father refused to look at her. She wouldn't have been surprised if her uncle hadn't bothered to meet her at the docks.<p>

Maybe if he had known the whole truth, he wouldn't have.

"They have better facilities on Shadow," the doctor told her parents. "They could minimize the scarring, perhaps. I'll send a reference."

"Your aunt and uncle have a horse ranch," her father told her, "It'll be good for you."

Her mother still could hardly string two words together whenever she looked at the damage—internal and external—done to her only remaining child.

Perhaps the doctors were better on Shadow, and perhaps the horse ranch would be therapeutic, but Lucretia knew its real merits lay in its distance. To them, she'd be just as dead as 'Colm and Perdita. And being dead was less painful than being marred beyond recognition and impregnated by a monster. If she wasn't practically immobilized by bandages, slings, and splints, and the ever present company of her nurses, she'd have done the deed herself by now.

Lucretia didn't wonder if she her parents had asked her aunt and uncle to take her or if they had offered. She didn't wonder if they would welcome her or resent her. She didn't know if she would be expected to work, or if she would be able to walk again, or the name of the stewardess who escorted her every step of the way from the docks on Branson's Mark to the station on Shadow where her uncle waited with an ordinary horse and cart. She didn't know the type of starship that carried her away from everything she'd ever known.

She didn't know, and she didn't ask.

She just drifted.

* * *

><p>She was showing by the time she got up the energy and fortitude to venture outside the house into the yard. She was down to the one knee-high boot that kept her ruined ankle immobile, an accompanying crutch, ice-pick headaches that came and went with no discernible triggers, and a deep, constant ache in her chest. Without her injuries as an excuse and under strict instructions from various medical personnel, Aunt Ancilla had begun forcing her out-of-doors for longer periods every day. Unresisting, she obeyed, though she rarely ventured further than the front porch. Occasionally Ancilla insisted on accompanying her on a walk through the grounds, walking quickly enough to leave Lucretia breathless and hobbling in pain if she tried to keep up.<p>

Back home, Lucretia had been no stranger to children. She had often watched little ones for parents who needed a baby-free afternoon or evening. She had listened with the other girls to the women's stories of carrying and birthing. She'd had dreams of her own. But not now. Not like this. Her brother and sister were dead. Her parents had all but disowned her. She'd been sent away to live on a strange planet, with people she'd never met. Even her body belonged to strangers. Two of them—one dead, one not yet alive.

Could the thing she carried even be considered a person?

Her doctors said it was healthy. She took that to mean it hadn't sprouted an extra arm as she'd half-expected. The bump on her brain had been large enough to deprive her of several months of memories, but the dark figures that woke her screaming in the night and her swollen, distended belly were quite stark enough reminders. She didn't know what terrified her more, the prospect that the thing inside her would be a monster—or that it wouldn't be.

Once her aunt stopped forcing such walks upon her, Lucretia found herself longing for the quiet, empty spaces of the fields, away from her aunt's judgemental gaze. She avoided the cattle and horses, but hobbling through the tall grasses, staring at the vast sky, she could close her eyes and let that emptiness reflect into the darkness of her coiled mind, let everything drain out of her like water, imagine it seeping into the thirsty ground and being carried away.

Other than Ancilla and the nurse that still occasionally checked on her, she spoke to no one. She avoided the ranch-hands as best she could. There were dozens of them; cowherds, manure-boys, managers, even a blacksmith. There were even a few women, all tall, brawny, and tanned from the hours in the sun. She steered clear of the herds and their keepers in her wanderings—they could want nothing from her after all, drained and empty as she was of every good thing. If she drew near by accident, she kept her head down and hobbled away as fast as she could.

Aurel first broke her circle of isolation. He found her one day sitting on the crest of a small ridge, looking over a broken ravine dotted with scrub brush and a tiny, glistening rivulet at the bottom. He walked up behind her, a scrawny, muss-haired boy not more than ten years old, with big hazel eyes and freckles, and greeted her so cheerfully that after her immediate, instinctive alarm at finding him so close without her noticing, she forced a small smile and greeted him softly in return. He apparently took this as some sort of invitation, plopped himself on the ground next to her, and talked nonstop for several minutes about the weather, the cattle, the ranch, and whatever other topic came to mind before suddenly jumping up and rushing off. "I'll see you tomorrow!" he shouted over his shoulder, and sure enough, he had found her under an oak tree in the south field and proceeded with the same ritual of meaningless chatter as the day before, followed by a swift and sudden departure.

At first she had sat stiffly, unsure how to feel about this sudden, talkative intrusion on her isolated existence. Then she wondered if he expected her to contribute—but he talked so fast, she wasn't sure she would be able to get a word in edgewise anyway. So she began to relax into the ritual, listening to the rise and fall of his voice, appreciating that someone, anyone, found her desirable company. He seemed to demand nothing but an audience, and besides the initial greeting, she rarely spoke to him, merely looking and nodding occasionally to show that she was listening.

And she _was _listening, and to her astonishment, she found herself interested in his stories and descriptions of the other ranchers. Leolinn was the head manager, hard but fair, old enough to know his trade, but young enough to maintain the rowdy hands and rambunctious beasts. Agoston was the old graybeard who kept the books, Faber shoed the horses and bent iron over the forge, Socorro and Felix were the youngest stable-sweepers along with Aurel, Ulises and Rufin the oldest ranchers. Balbus had a stammer and Egnatius had a temper. Celso and Crispin were twins, tall and curly haired, and the heartthrobs of every village girl, much to the chagrin of Levon and Corin, the shorter, freckled brothers from the moon of Summerfair who couldn't get a girl if they begged. Porcius was mean to the younger boys, Galenus was unflappable, no matter what crisis occurred, and Ellery had been to school longer than anyone on the ranch except Agoston. Admeta ran horses with the best of the men, and Adelais, wife to Leolinn, carried her babe in a sling on her back as she tended the cattle. Aurel glanced at her stomach and then away quickly as he told her this, but otherwise gave no indication of curiosity about her situation, for which she was grateful. The ranch hands could say whatever they liked about her, as long as they asked no questions.

Weeks passed thus, Aurel as her only company, a brief, blinding ray of sunshine in her dark world that always rushed off at the end of ten or fifteen minutes as though he feared to stay too long under her clouds. She spent her days wandering the open fields, her nights shifting uncomfortably around the strangely restless being inside her.

It was born under a sky of black and violet clouds, split with lighting and thunder that drowned out her screams. All of the terror and rage that had been bottled inside her for nine long months, poured out of her in an uncontrolled rush. She wouldn't stop screaming, she couldn't, not even when the tiny bloody bundle was whisked away, its own mewling cry lost in the chaos and noise. A needle pricked her arm and silence consumed her pain.

She woke to a strange noise. A wavering, gurgling cry, a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. A small cradle had been set up nearby, and the sound emanated from it. The sound was piteous and forlorn, but Lucretia turned her back on the cradle and joined its muffled sobbing.

When she woke again, the nurse tried unsuccessfully to make her eat, then put a squirming, noisy bundle next to her on the bed.

She didn't want to touch it. She couldn't—if she touched it, it would be real, alive, something that needed her, wanted her, and she already knew that nobody, nothing could ever want her. The noise it was making hurt her ears and she pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. The nurse was murmuring something to her, but she couldn't hear over the noise, the endless, wailing noise. Finally, the nurse took hold of her arms, arranging them like a doll, and Lucretia let her put the bundled up thing into her arms. The nurse showed her how to feed it, and she cooperated, led along like so much empty clay.

Lucretia would do nothing that was not demanded of her by her aunt or the nurse that stayed on. She would not lift a finger to hold it unless it was placed in her arms. Ancilla grew obviously exasperated, leaving them both more and more to the care of the nurse, whose care, while professional, lacked warmth.

After nearly a month, Ancilla had put the tiny thing in her arms and practically shoved her out the front door. It whimpered softly, and she sank into a chair on the porch, staring listlessly out at the empty, gray sky.

"Oh," whispered a voice on her left, "oh, he's so little!" She blinked at Aurel, wide eyed and staring down at the bundle she held loosely in her lap. "Can I touch him?" he asked, and then reached for the downy forehead without waiting for a reply. She followed Aurel's gaze to the ugly, wrinkled face, red and splotched, and she idly wondered if he was already old inside like her. The fussing stopped briefly and then began again in earnest; a tiny, flailing hand had worked itself free of the swaddling. She reached to draw it closed and the hand caught her finger and held it with strength that surprised her. Something flared in her soul, something she had been so long without she could no longer identify it. Slowly, oh so carefully, she gathered the infant closer to her. Aurel was watching her with wide, earnest eyes. "What's his name?" he asked eagerly.

"Malcolm," she said without hesitation, then to the infant, "Hush now, Malcolm."


End file.
